Part 29

Naples itself, the largest and most populous city in Italy, is, from a little distance, picturesque, resting, somewhat like Genoa, on a half–circle of sloping heights, with a broad margin to the shore, the houses towards which are lofty, many being five and even six storeys high. In the central and denser parts of the town they are even higher, while in these portions the streets are mere lanes, 15 to 20 feet wide, and irregular; and if they be not absolutely unsafe to visit, must form a very labyrinth of perplexity to the stranger. In the newer parts of the city the streets are spacious and elegant. Every here and there, a jutting prominence or a bold height crowned with some peculiar structure gives character to the scene. The Chiaja is a long strip of land turned into a public garden or park lying in or towards the north end of the town, and fronting the sea. A broad street, the Riviera di Chiaja, flanks it, lined by the trees of the park on the one side, and by hotels and other buildings on the other, and terminated at the north end by Posilipo, a hill perforated by the famous grotto of that name, or tunnel, I presume half natural and half excavated, which affords an access to the other side. Up from the Chiaja, on a height, the Castle of St. Elmo stands, the interior of which our limited time did not afford us opportunity of seeing. Leaving the Chiaja by a handsome drive which has been formed by the shore, we pass the Castel del Ovo, which stands out into the sea, cresting a large rock or small island connected with the land by a mole or breakwater. It is ugly and old, but can scarcely, because it is so, be called picturesque, though at least it is striking or prominent; and I suppose it does or can, with other fortifications, offer some protection to the port; but it was, and perhaps still is, used as a prison, and, in spite of sunshine, is gloomy enough for that. From this point southward, commencing with the broad Strada San Lucia, the harbour lies, in which there is a moderate amount of shipping, but small as compared with that of Genoa. Life abounds about this harbour and the adjoining quays, along which broad streets run, filled with sellers of fish and other commodities, and with crowds of pedestrians and carriages. The road turns up from S. Lucia into the large open space called the Piazza del Plebiscito—one side occupied by a handsome semicircular colonnade, and the other by the royal palace, where the king was at the time of our visit residing, two equestrian statues in the centre of the piazza contributing to its adornment. The Toledo or High Street of Naples issues out of it. Proceeding farther along the harbour, and at its extreme south, we come to the Castel del Carmine, also forming a feature in the landscape, and from it a road leads up to the railway station, which is just outside the inhabited part of Naples. From the harbour, or any point which commands a view, the town looks bright and picturesque, and in rather striking contrast with its dirty population. Ascent of the lighthouse for the sake of the view is recommended.

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The only church in Naples which we thought at all comparable to those in Rome was the cathedral, which is a large and handsome building. One of its side chapels is that of the famous St. Januarius, where the blood and other relics of the martyr are preserved.

The hotels are situated principally on the line of buildings facing the sea from the Chiaja southward to S. Lucia. But some new hotels have been opened on the high ground near the Castle of St. Elmo, thought to be a more healthy locality. This may or may not be, but one requires to be careful as to where he lives in Naples. In fact, the natural air of Naples must be extremely salubrious, to counteract, as it seems to a large extent to do, the evil influences arising from so large a population living upon so comparatively small a portion of the tideless Mediterranean. Were it otherwise, fever would be constantly raging, and Naples depopulated.

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We spent the forenoon of the following day in the Museum. This is an immense collection of antiquities, principally from Pompeii, and is well worthy of several visits, without which, in fact, it cannot be properly studied. Illustrated catalogues can be procured, which are no doubt useful, but are expensive. Our time would only allow of a general examination. The Museum contains thousands of articles of great interest, and very many which show to what a state of perfection art had arrived at the time Pompeii was destroyed. The sculptures of all descriptions and pictures are very numerous, and among many others deserving of special note was the grand group called the Toro Farnese, of masterly power. It is composed of five graceful and pleasing human figures, besides the bull rampant and a dog, and other sculpture, and if cut out of one block of marble, would seem to be a miracle of art. Why it should have been removed from Rome to Naples I am not aware. But the Museum at Naples is very spacious and extensive, and may have afforded better accommodation than any place in Rome. Some of the rooms are filled with articles of domestic use recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii; and, what is very curious, in one room loaves of bread, grain of various sorts, dates, and other edibles 1800 years old are exhibited. Many of the curious frescoes found upon the walls of Pompeii have been removed to the Museum and built bodily into its walls. The colours of these frescoes are considerably faded, but copying them seems to afford employment to a number of artists, who, however, impart to their copies the supposed original brightness of the pictures, and one seldom sees an original Pompeian fresco possessing that vividness of colouring which representations of them usually manifest. One room is fitted up as a reproduction of a Pompeian bedroom, and gives a greater idea of luxurious comfort than one would imagine possible from the appearance of the rooms, now in ruins, which we afterwards saw in Pompeii itself.

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The afternoon is the time for seeing the Chiaja, for then all the private carriages of Naples may be witnessed driving about; and on one occasion we had the good fortune to pass the Princess Margherita, now the Queen of Italy. Girls are on the watch to sell large and beautiful bouquets of flowers at marvellously cheap prices. An aquarium has been built near the centre of the Chiaja gardens, which we visited the morning of the day following, before going to Castellamare. It is not nearly so large as that at Brighton, but it is interesting enough. It contained, _inter alia_, a good many octopi, which repulsive fish is said to be sold and eaten in Naples, and, in all probability, occasionally appears under some disguised name at the hotel dinners.

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Naples is a great place for the sale of photographs and articles of bijouterie in lava, and of coral and tortoiseshell. At Mr. Sommer’s Fine Art Establishment near the Chiaja, a large collection of beautiful photographs of almost all places in Italy is to be found. These are very moderate in price—the cheapest in Italy—as well as good, and in number exceed five thousand. I laid in a good stock, and only wish I had taken more. Any of them can be at once procured by reference to the number they bear. They are best kept flat, but if rolling be preferred, they should always be rolled up with the photograph side outwards. Why it is that photographs of a size which cost a shilling at Naples should be charged five shillings or six shillings, or even more, at home, I don’t know. But the consequence is that people buy the Italian photographs by the hundred, whereas at home, if they buy at all, it is by the unit. Our dealers plainly miss the market by their high prices. Mr. Sommer might do well to extend his operations to the towns of France and to Switzerland, where photographs are expensive.

Among other shops we also visited Squadrilli’s, which is recommended in Bædeker. Here we found a well–stocked store of articles in lava and coral, but owing, I suppose, to the thieving which exists in Naples, and from which, no doubt, they have sometimes suffered, we were rather unpleasantly watched by three persons, a circumstance of which others who had been there also complained. The articles, however, seemed to be good, while the prices are fixed, though a discount of five per cent, was allowed for cash. The gold used in Naples for bijouterie is considered to be inferior to the standard quality of England, and even of Rome, which professes to be, like England, of eighteen carats. Squadrilli allowed that their gold was only fourteen carats, and perhaps his estimate might not apply to all his articles. There are many imitations, however, even of this inferior gold, and some articles, possibly ‘job lots,’ are sold in Naples at astonishingly low prices. The articles supposed to be of lava are, I believe, in reality cut out of the limestone rocks of Somma, one of the peaks of Vesuvius.

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We were anxious to make our stay in Naples as short as possible, as so much is heard of its insalubrity. After the general survey we had thus made of it, we took train to Castellamare, the railway passing Mount Vesuvius on the one side and the coast on the other, so that we were in view of the bay nearly all the way. Castellamare is a convenient halting–place for seeing Pompeii, which, however, may be visited from Naples itself, either by hiring a carriage from Naples,—making a pretty long drive, and, I believe, of little interest, the road being a continuous street of houses,—or by taking the train as far as Torre dell’ Annunciata, and a carriage thence to Pompeii, which is not two miles off. Castellamare is one of those populous unclean towns which lie upon the bay. Friends had said it was a remarkably nice place to stop at, and the Hotel Quisisana, on the height above the town, is a fairly comfortable one, commanding a splendid view of the bay, of Vesuvius, and of Naples beyond. Perhaps we did not remain long enough to acquire a knowledge of its beauties, but we were not taken with the dirty town; while the garden of the hotel, which might have been laid out to great advantage, and thus have helped to reconcile us to the place, was no better than such Italian gardens usually are. I suppose that Nature has been so lavish of her bounties when the sun shines, that the Italians think it unnecessary to supplement her labours. Yet I have sometimes thought that the time of waiters, who between meals in foreign places have often little to do, might, not unprofitably to the hotels, and with some advantage in health to themselves, be occupied in trimming the hotel gardens. Our bedrooms looked towards the bay, and therefore were, I presume, considered more choice; but being a northern or north–western exposure, we found them extremely cold at night. It was, however, intensely interesting to look across to Vesuvius, which I had seen emitting a red light on our second evening at Naples, without being aware, unfortunately, till afterwards that this light was unusual, and that had I watched it for half an hour longer I should have seen it become more intensely bright. People were then in full expectation of an eruption, and even the very day had been predicted, although the premonitory symptoms of streams drying up had not appeared; but expectation was not gratified.

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We arranged the following morning to drive to Pompeii, which is about three miles distant.

Pompeii on being approached seems like a huge mound, somewhat akin in the distance to a fortified place. The excavated town itself is not visible from the road. The visitor is deposited at the door of what appears to be a sort of tavern or place of refreshment, through which, threading one’s way among tables, entrance is had to the excavations. We found the tavern filled with people taking an early dinner, or rather breakfast, rendering the access by no means an agreeable one. Here leaving with the _cameriere_ our wraps,—not without some misgivings, fortunately not realized, that we should never see them again,—we passed up a stair, and through a magazine for sale of lava ornaments, etc., the prices asked for which, as usual in show places, were exorbitantly and forbiddingly high. Outside the magazine we paid two francs each for admission and for the assistance of a guide (children being charged only a half–franc each), and procured a little French–speaking guide in smart uniform and side arms, whom we found very obliging and attentive. These guides are necessary, and must be taken, though sometimes respectable people who have been there before are allowed to go without them; perhaps not always with advantage to the ruins, as it is a very common trick with people who should know better, and who might not be expected to do such a thing, to pocket stones which can be of no use whatever to themselves, but the abstraction of which is detrimental to the place whence they are taken. On one occasion in Italy, a lady of a party in which I was—who acknowledged to being in the habit of bringing away a stone from every place to which she had been—quietly pocketed a piece of marble lying on the ground, when the custodier, who was keeping a sharp look–out, went up to her and desired her to replace it. It was a numbered piece, and he would, he said, be responsible for it to the authorities. The practice of chipping stones from a building of note, or taking up loose pieces, cannot be too severely reprehended, and ought sometimes to be punished. The guides at Pompeii are not allowed to receive any gratuity from the visitors, but they make a little by an accorded permission to sell photographs of the ruins.

Passing through an old gateway, we were ushered into a museum, the contents of which are not numerous, as the bulk of the articles found is sent to the large Museum of Naples. It contains, however, some things of great interest, particularly the casts of men and women found in Pompeii who had perished in the great overthrow, and whose bodies had been so curiously enveloped with the scoriæ as to form a close–fitting, indurated mould, and a cast from it, when the dust is blown out, reproduces every line of the body or of the clothing of the suffocated person. Some of the casts so taken give a clear representation of the form of the features; and I noticed that the dress of the men seemed to be very similar to what is still worn by those in the vicinity, particularly in the tight–fitting, wrought woollen jacket covering the body. If I was right in this supposition, it is another instance of the manner in which the people cling to ancient habits and modes of dress.

We were then taken to the excavations which are being systematically carried on, and our examination commenced with the forum, a large open space, containing the remains of the pillars by which it was surrounded. From these remains and the remains of other public buildings, it is evident that Pompeii was a very elegantly adorned city. It had temples, no less than nine being marked upon the plan, but they are all in ruins; only fragments exist, the pillars and superincumbent building having been almost everywhere thrown down. In some of them, such as the temple of Venus and temple of Isis, a few columns, with their entablature, stand, to indicate the beauty of their construction. Besides temples there have been excavated two theatres and a large amphitheatre, in excellent preservation, capable of accommodating 20,000 persons, and nearly, in length and breadth, as large as that at Nismes; also, as usual in Roman towns, baths, besides other public buildings. But probably the greatest interest attaches to the remains of the private dwellings. It is rarely that private houses exhibit, after a lapse of nearly 2000 years, even in ruins, what they were when in occupation. Here, however, the lava or scoriæ or dust of Vesuvius by hermetical seal closed up these houses, in order that they might be seen by the people of a long–distant age. Many of the houses in Pompeii belonged to men of wealth, and they are all laid out, in the better class at least, upon much the same plan, entering upon a square court, open in the centre to the outer air, in the middle of which a marble fountain played. The rooms were built around or beyond, the principal or public rooms being to the back—a mode of design probably suitable to the climate, at least in summer, and admitting, no doubt, of great elegance of arrangement and design, and of which such houses as those of Marcus Holconius, of the Faun, of Sallust, of the poet, of Meleager, and of Cornelius Rufus afford examples,—all containing beautiful fluted pillars and other decorations, sometimes in marble, still standing, while the walls were tastefully decorated with that peculiar description of painting well known as Pompeian. Some of the houses appear to be only one storey high, but stairs indicate a second storey, and it is even supposed that in some cases there may have been a third. But they had no appearance to the street, while the streets themselves are narrow, so much so that it is impossible to see how in many of them even the smallest carriages could pass each other without encroaching on the equally narrow footway or _trottoir_ (discovery of the remains of it here revealing its use in ancient times); but the large stones or slabs forming the street pavement are in some places marked with a deep rut, indicating a good deal of carriage traffic. The shops on the streets are small, and are sometimes built into the dwellings, so that shop floors then were probably as remunerative as they seem to be now with ourselves, although persons now in similar rank of life in Great Britain would little like to allow a portion of their mansions to be so occupied. As, however, the streets were so confined, there could have been no view from the house itself upon the front facing the street; yet, no doubt, from some windows in the upper apartments behind there might be fine glimpses of the bay and of Vesuvius, as well as of the surrounding country. At all events, we obtained excellent views from the ruins, especially from the walls. Vesuvius appears close at hand, and one feels astonished at the foolhardiness of people building towns and houses so close under the fiery mountain after the tremendous warnings received in the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We were shown at one place in the ‘House of Diomede’ a long vault or cellar, in which the remains were found of seventeen unfortunate persons who had taken refuge there during the awful time when they knew not where to flee, and supposed that the walls of the house would cover them from calamity. We could not look upon such places without thinking what an appalling time it must have been, and what heartrending agonies must then have been endured. Notwithstanding all the elegance of the public portions of the houses, and perhaps even of the private chambers, it seemed as if the actual comfort of the inhabitants could not be great, and especially in the matter of bedroom accommodation, for I imagine the sleeping–rooms were of the smallest dimensions—mere closets, not such as people of the present day in good circumstances would approve.

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It would, however, be impossible, in small compass, to give any adequate idea of these houses or of their decorations. Books have been written upon the subject, and an excellent recent account of Pompeii, its history, buildings, and antiquities, containing nearly 300 illustrations, has been written by Dr. Thomas H. Dyer. Nothing, indeed, but a visit to Pompeii itself can convey a sufficient idea of the resuscitated city; but a study of Mr. Dyer’s book before going, as well as after a visit, will help materially to an understanding of it. Pompeii is a place of engrossing interest entirely unique, and in some respects it offers, I think, more attractions to a visitor than any other in Italy, and well merits more than one visit. The excavations are still proceeding, and it will probably be many years before they are completed, as there is still a large piece of ground, probably as much again as has already been opened, on which to operate.

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Having seen Pompeii, we did not care to stay longer at Castellamare, and next day, taking a carriage with three horses, the bells jingling cheerily all the way, drove to Sorrento. The drive occupied an hour and a half, and is considered to be one of the finest to be had in Italy. The road borders the bay, and passes through several large Italian villages most picturesquely situated, and across a deep ravine, evidently the result of an earthquake, by a beautiful bridge. Sorrento is a long town, and the road through its suburbs is shut in by lofty and most objectionable garden walls. As we drove down the road towards it, from the height to the eastward the place looked very charming, surrounded by hills on every side except the north, which is open to the sea. Turning down a long narrow lane, we arrived at the Tramontano Hotel (kept by an Irish landlady, an active and most obliging woman), where everything is remarkably comfortable, and the accommodation is ample. It is situated on classic ground, Tasso having resided in a house which, or its site, is now part of the hotel. A garden, where, no doubt, Tasso often meditated, encloses the hotel upon the south, while the north windows and terraces command magnificent views of the bay, of the islands, of Naples lying opposite, and of Vesuvius, whose smoke, always ascending, is an excellent indicator of the direction of the wind. The garden extends away to the eastward, where a dependence or additional house is kept for the accommodation of the guests. A large public room, with windows to the bay, was being added to the main house, so that now both _salon_ and _salle–à–manger_ are large rooms. Having had experience of the cold of northerly chambers at Castellamare, we chose cheerful rooms on the south side overlooking the hotel yard, with all its enlivening bustle, and the garden and green hills behind.

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Sorrento lies upon a platform or broad level space of land, the seaward side being high perpendicular cliffs, so that one looks sheer down from the hotel windows on the north to the water far below, which is reached from the hotel by a winding tunnel cut into the rock. It is placed, like Mentone, under the guard of a semicircle of hills, although these are both nearer and much lower than those at Mentone; but as the town faces the north, instead of the south as at Mentone, it is rather a summer than a winter residence. We had it very cold there during the night, but in the glowing mid–day sun it was charming to look out upon the water and land, and see everything bathed in an atmosphere of light, while vegetation was now beginning to advance, lending an additional charm to the landscape. We were not, however, altogether without rain. One night was particularly stormy and wet.

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